Wherein I (what else?) Complain

I examined my hair in the mirror. Soon the sheer weight of it would begin to overwhelm its dense curl and it would begin to 'fall' instead of growing outward like a little mane.

I'll never cut my hair again....

I should stayed in the hospital and let them give me fluids. I'd have recovered more quickly I think.

I got a letter from my doctor today. It was too thin to be the handicap placard forms, so I knew it could only be one other thing...

Ah, ha, yes. A letter advising me to "seek health services elsewhere." Due to a "serious deterioration in doctor/patient relationship."

'This bitch," I said under my breath.

She lied to me! What she did was unprofessional. She should apologize!

So ranted the 'it's not fair' center in my brain.

The rest of me said, "They never apologize. They never do."

I wanted to be cavalier.

I couldn't.

My nose is running. I'm irritable. I'm going into withdrawal. And now I'm down a primary care doctor. It's not bad...the withdrawal part. I was careful to taper myself down over nearly a month's time.

I finally get in contact with my neurologist's nurse practitioner about the whole ER 'altered mental status' debacle. She doesn't think it needs a follow-up appointment or any adjustment in medication. As long as I can get out of bed and to the bathroom by myself.

Okay, but might I set the well-being bar just a wee bit higher than "self-toileting?"

I wish that this weren't happening.

I used to be the kind of person who could bear up under anything without complaining. Now I complain all the time. I cry, but in frustration rather than sadness.

My ambition which drove me through undergrad with a scholarship and grad school with a fellowship now seems to be eating me alive.

I try to write some more poetry as I wait to hear from the journals I submitted to in September, preparing a second bunch (a winter bunch) of poems to submit to yet more magazines. I continue remodeling my room, scraping the baseboards free of paint, painting my dad's old desk, taking down the blinds and hanging curtains.

I scrubbed my closet doors free of my sister's graffiti, a process that took hours and left my hands, elbows and shoulders aching. But when an old knob to one of the doors left a gaping hole where I unscrewed it I started crying and pitched it across the room. My cat started from his perch on the dresser, knocking over the phone and the TV set. I screamed at the top of my lungs.

I'm kind of an emotional wreck. I was someone who really needed to feel in control of her life and now I'm just the opposite. Such is the ignorance and indifference to my condition that I consider a good appointment one where the doctor admits zie has no idea what zie's doing.

I am unaccustomed to being in a position where sheer effort did not yield some results. If I was untalented at a subject I studied harder and did better. When I set my grand goals, I went after them with everything in me.

I know it isn't, but my inability to get my doctors to take an interest in my symptoms, no matter how strange or debilitating they might be feels like a personal failure.

Surely if I presented myself better, my doctors wouldn't be so rude to me. Surely if I faxed all the right documentation ahead of time, they wouldn't be so dismissive. Like when I was in the hospital for the first time, not knowing what was wrong with me, I was prepared to jump through any hoop, no matter how difficult or degrading for that matter, if I thought it would lead to some help for me.

Because I equated help with getting better and getting better with going back to my first, best set of goals.

At one end I am blocked by my illness and at the other by doctors.

My ambition and my fury mingle, forming a single destructive will.

Surely whatever I turn that will toward will be completely obliterated.

So I have to keep it away from myself at all costs.